Greetings fellow travelers! Join Alice and I in welcoming back Szeth to the pages of the Stormlight Archive! It’s been a long time since we’ve seen him (last time was in Edgedancer) and he’s definitely found himself in unusual surroundings, having fallen in with the Skybreakers. And speaking of unusual surroundings, Kaladin and company are still trapped in Shadesmar. Let’s check in with them and see how everyone’s favorite bridgeboy is doing, shall we?
Reminder: we’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the ENTIRE NOVEL in each reread—if you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done.
In this week’s reread we also discuss some things from Warbreaker in the Cosmere Connections section. If you don’t want any spoilers at all, best to give this section a pass… but if you have no plans on reading it or just want a refresher, we’ll be discussing some of Nightblood’s backstory there.
Also, a little call-out to this lovely artwork of Pattern by Isaac Stewart that will be adorning stickers at Dragon*Con! He’s so storming CUTE!
Chapter Recap
WHO: Szeth; Kaladin
WHERE: Purelake; Shadesmar, near Kholinar (L: I’ve been having a lot of fun making these animated gifs of the maps! This week was a little challenging as we’re dealing with two chapters, so keep an eye out for the white circle signifying where Szeth is on the physical realm version.)
WHEN: 1174.2.4.5 (about a week ahead of the main timeline); 1174.2.3.4 (the day after chapter 89)
Szeth son-Neturo returns! He’s at the Purelake with the rest of the Skybreakers, where he swears his first Ideal and learns a bit more about the only order of Knights Radiant which wasn’t disbanded after the Recreance.
Meanwhile, Kaladin has a short flashback in which he recalls some wisdom from an old military commander. He and Syl have a brief discussion in Shadesmar, with her expressing her worry for him.
Beginnings
Title: Reborn
Szeth of Shinovar, once called the Assassin in White, had been reborn. Mostly.
AA: Heh. Only mostly reborn.
Title: Why He Froze
“Do you want to talk about it?” Tukks asked. “The moment when you froze during practice?”
AA: This is another of the rare instances when the chapter title isn’t a direct quotation, but … it sure is an apt title!
Heralds
Oddly enough, both chapters show Chana as the only Herald. Chana is the Guard, patron of Dustbringers, associated with the divine attributes of Brave and Obedient. You’d expect Nale and Jezrien respectively for a Skybreaker and a Windrunner, but… nope.
AA: For chapter 90, the best I can come up with is Nightblood’s presence; it and Szeth seem to sort of guard one another, in an odd fashion. And of course, Szeth definitely displays obedience in the chapter.
For chapter 91, the Guard could be Tukks, Kaladin’s old sergeant. Or it could be Syl herself, attempting to help Kaladin. I think, though, that it might be the repeated assumption that he was afraid (as opposed to brave)—and maybe even his fear of killing someone who didn’t deserve it.
Icons
The character icons this week are the Assassin, for Szeth, and the Banner & Spears for Kaladin.
Epigraphs
I have done my best to separate fact from fiction, but the two blend like mixing paint when the Voidbringers are involved. Each of the Unmade has a dozen names, and the powers ascribed to them rang from the fanciful to the terrifying.
—From Hessi’s Mythica, page 4
I should point out that although many personalities and motives are ascribed to them, I’m convinced that the Unmade were still spren. As such, they were as much manifestations of concepts or divine forces as they were individuals.
—From Hessi’s Mythica, page 7
L: So this, then, begs the continual question—what were they the spren of? I don’t think we’ll be getting an answer to this particular question for a long, long time.
AA: Agreed. This is probably not something we’ll learn in the near future. It was suggested (by Isilel, iirc) last week that Hessi might be a Herald in disguise, writing from personal knowledge but disguising it as research, and probably leaving out things that she couldn’t rationalize knowing. I’m not sure that changes how we read her book, but it’s an interesting slant; if true, there may be things here that no one else would have known.
Thematic Thoughts
“I wasn’t afraid of getting hurt.” Kaladin took a deep breath. “I was afraid of making someone hurt.”
L: As the kids these days say, big mood, Kal. I totally understand him, here. Often times I have put myself in harm’s way specifically because I didn’t want to see someone else get hurt, and the thought of myself just… didn’t even occur to me. But this is important for us to see, because this right here is the entire crux of Kaladin’s character arc for this book:
“I think about my mates,” Tukks said. “I can’t let the lads down. My squad is my family now.”
“So you kill someone else’s family?”
“It’s hard. You’d be surprised how many men look in the face of an enemy and find that they’re simply not capable of hurting another person.”
…
“It’s good you aren’t too eager,” Tukks said. “Means you’re sane. I’ll take ten unskilled with earnest hearts over one callous idiot who thinks this is all a game.”
The world doesn’t make sense, Kal thought. His father, the consummate surgeon, told him to avoid getting too wrapped up in his patients’ emotions. And here was a career killer, telling him to care?
L: And there it is. Kaladin’s character boiled down. Which really makes me wonder about this next bit:
“Don’t worry about the war, or even the battle. Focus on your squadmates, Kal. Keep them alive. Be the man they need.”
L: There’s a lot of speculation about that tricky next Ideal of Kaladin’s, and it’s almost certainly going to have something to do with this concept. But I’d just like to point out that Kaladin has been displaying this exact sentiment up until this point, over and over. He protects the men in his squad in Amaram’s army. He protects the other bridgemen. He protects Bridge Four. He protects Dalinar and Adolin and Shallan. He protects Elhokar. The issue, of course, is what to do when two of his “family groups” are fighting against one another.
AA: Indeed. How do you define Tukks’s “them” in the Kholinar situation? And before long, we’ll see that there’s another question: when you need to take care of two different groups/individuals who aren’t in the same place, how do you prioritize that? And then there’s the thought at the end of the flashback:
He never told Tukks the truth. When Kal had frozen on the practice field, it hadn’t been out of fear. He’d been very sure he could hurt someone. In fact, he’d realized that he could kill, if needed.
And that was what had terrified him.
AA: How does that fit? It’s easy to see him freezing because he couldn’t figure out who to protect when it was his parsh friends and his Wall Guard friends fighting each other. But… how does the realization that he could kill fit in with this? Was it realizing how easy it would be to kill a friend?
L: I think that this was his old self as trained by his father. I imagine that, as a surgeon’s son, Kal was raised to view all life as sacred. The idea that he could kill someone instead of just injuring them must have been very sobering and taken quite a lot of getting used to. (He certainly doesn’t seem too upset about it the “next” time we see him, in the flashback at the beginning of The Way of Kings when he’s protecting the new recruit and takes out Shallan’s Shardbearer brother.)
Stories & Songs
The Herald had taken him on a mission to Tashikk, hunting Surgebinders from other orders. A heartless act that Nin had explained would prevent the coming of the Desolation.
Except that it had not. The Everstorm’s return had convinced Nin he was wrong, and he’d abandoned Szeth in Tashikk. Weeks had passed there until Nin had returned to collect him. The Herald had dropped Szeth here at the fortress, then had vanished into the sky again, this time off to “seek guidance.”
AA: The first part of that is a quick summary of Edgedancer, at least from Szeth’s perspective. The last tells us a little about where Szeth and Nale were for the last couple of months; Szeth was waiting in Tashikk, and Nale was off panicking. Then Szeth was dropped off here at the Purelake, at a fortress belonging to the Skybreakers; I’m betting that Nale went flying off to find Ishar and confer with him. It’s just possible that he went to Ishar the first time, decided he’d gone too far round the twist, and went to find some of the other Heralds this second time.
Still and all, this is a good reminder that for all his earlier self-confidence, Nale was badly shaken when the red-eyed parsh in the Everstorm proved that murdering all the potential Radiants hadn’t done a thing to prevent the Desolation. It seems he should have known that, doesn’t it? He was a Herald, part of the Oathpact. He knew that the Desolations came when a Herald broke in Damnation, not when the Radiants got stronger. What on Roshar made him think this was a good plan?
Bruised & Broken
Like most things, death had not been Szeth’s to claim.…
His spirit hadn’t properly reattached to his body.
AA: Well, here’s our first contact with Szeth since Edgedancer, and I’m not real sure I’ve missed him. I feel sorry for the guy in some ways, but at the same time I find him deeply annoying. He’s got such a victimhood complex because of the things he did when he accepted the “Truthless” label the Stone Shamans put on him.
L: I, on the other hand, adore Szeth. Sure, he’s got a victimhood complex—but no more so than Kaladin did at the beginning of The Way of Kings. He’s been just as badly used, one could argue more so! While Kaladin was betrayed and forced into slavery, Szeth was forced—by the constraints of his honor—to kill those he viewed as innocent. How terrible, to feel as though you have to do such terrible things, and to have those things weighing on your conscience for your entire life! Especially given the fact that the entire reason he was named Truthless was false!
AA: I fully agree that Szeth was badly used—especially by people who should have listened to his argument but instead doubled down on what they wanted to be true. And I’ll even go so far as to say that he at least, unlike some *coughMoashcough* accepts the guilt for all the people he killed. He just doesn’t accept the blame, and I find that … well, mixed. And I guess I just don’t like him as much as I do some others, so that’s probably part of it. (But him and his “sword-nimi” is worth a lot on the plus side of the scale, so there’s that!)
L: Aside from the “victimhood complex” issue, this concept of the fact that this soul and body aren’t connected anymore is really fascinating, and we’ll discuss it in more depth down in the Sheer Speculation section.
Do I dare bring them judgment? a part of him wondered. Dare I trust myself with the sword of vengeance?
L: This is why I like him, I think. He’s willing to self-examine, he doubts himself. This is promising in a character who was very much set up to be an anti-hero type.
AA: It’s one of his very best thoughts—and one reason why I suspect that if anyone can truly qualify for the Fifth Ideal, it might be him. Because he’s not arrogant about it. (See Weighty Words below.)
Hey, the voices seem quiet today. That’s nice, isn’t it?
Mentioning it brought the whispers to Szeth’s attention. Nin had not healed Szeth’s madness. He’d called it an effect of Szeth’s connection to the powers, and said that he was hearing trembles from the Spiritual Realm.
L: Szeth seems to think that these are the voices of those he’s killed, but I don’t think he’s right on that count. If they’re actually coming from the Spiritual Realm, are they maybe Singer souls who haven’t found vessels in the physical realm yet? Are they spren? Heck maybe they are the souls of the people he’s killed, not like we really know where the souls of the dead on Roshar end up, do we?
AA: I keep wondering if there’s some kind of link that keeps people in the Spiritual Realm linked to the person who killed them, especially if Investiture was involved. Dalinar and Szeth both seem to hear “the voices of those they killed,” but not too many other people have that issue.
Before he’d become Truthless.
No. You were never Truthless. Remember that.
L: He’s been wronged just as surely as Kaladin ever was! Both sold into slavery, both for doing the right thing. I hope that they can overcome their dislike of one another and bond sometime in the future books. I’d also like to point out that he was essentially gaslit, and that makes me more angry on his behalf.
“I found your brother,” Tukks noted.
L: ::loud sobs:: TIEN WHYYYYYY
AA: Nooooooo… I’m never sure if it’s worse to think he was killed just because some inept commander put him in the wrong place, or because he was an incipient Lightweaver with a target on his innocent back. I mean, I’m pretty sure by now that it was the latter set up to look like the former; I’m just not sure which is worse.
“Something’s wrong inside you. But I don’t know what.”
L: Jeez. Syl not pulling any punches with the wording on that one. I just hope that it’s not something “wrong” like the last time something was “wrong” and almost led to their bond breaking.
“I … was just surprised to find Sah there,” he said. “Not to mention Moash.”
How do you do it? How can you hurt people, Tukks….
AA: Poor confused Windrunner. I don’t think “surprised” quite covers it, but never mind. We get it. You’d gotten sort of used to the idea that the people you fought were people, but it never quite registered that someday, the people on “the other side” might be your friends. It’s not really about “how can you hurt people” in the abstract. It’s about when “they” turn out to be a person, in a very concrete sense.
Squires & Sidekicks
Besides, this flight was not truly his. He continued falling upward until another Skybreaker caught him and Lashed him downward….
AA: Well, that’s a bit of a comedown for the guy who flew everywhere with Jezrien’s Honorblade. If he weren’t so self-deprecating at this point, he’d have to kind of resent it, wouldn’t he?
L: And yet he doesn’t seem resentful at all. If anything, he’s humble about it.
Younger than the other sergeants, [Sergeant Tukks] had features that were … off somehow. Perhaps it was his short stature, or his sunken cheeks.
AA: Gah! Every time someone is described as “off somehow” (or words to that effect) I hurl myself headlong to the conclusion that they must be a worldhopper. He probably isn’t, of course.
Places & Peoples
“In speaking this ideal,” Ki said, “you are officially pardoned for any past misdeeds or sins. We have paperwork signed by the proper authorities for this region.”
L: Sure, this region. But if he’s committed crimes (like, oh, say, the assassination of a dozen world leaders) in other regions, wouldn’t he still be—
You know what, as I was typing this I realized that they’ve probably got paperwork for every region squirreled away. Never mind. It’s still pretty cool, though, that they grant unconditional amnesty like this.
AA: It’s fairly impressive to see just how extensive their official pull is, but I also find it a bit arrogant. We have the paperwork, so we declare you officially pardoned. It grates on me; but that might be the manner of the speaker. I do like the concept of getting a new start when you take the first step of Radiant-hood, though I don’t think in reality it’s quite that simple. Just ask Teft. Or Szeth, for that matter. You can have all the official pardon in the world, but if you have a conscience (or an addiction), you know you still have the burden.
Cleanse Shinovar, Szeth thought. That would be his quest.
L: I really want to know what the heck is going on over in Shinovar that’s so bad that Szeth feels like he needs to cleanse it!
AA: I’ve always assumed it’s the wilfulness of the Stone Shamanate—those people who have declared that their assumptions are Truth, and anyone who disagrees automatically becomes the lowest person in the entire nation. But I could be forgetting something.
For a moment he felt the freedom of flight — reminding him of his first days, holding an Honorblade long ago. Before he’d become Truthless.
AA: We’ll learn more about this as we follow Szeth’s story, but this is a pointed note that he trained with the Honorblade before they named him Truthless. There’s been a lot of careless assumption that when you get named Truthless, they give you an Honorblade and shove you off to wreak havoc on the rest of the world; I think that’s incorrect. My personal belief is that trainees of the Stone Shamanate train with all the Honorblades (we’ll learn about his experience with other Honorblades later), and those who are particularly promising and reach a certain level within the organization become the temporary owners of the different Blades. Since they probably didn’t have a rule for what to do when someone at that level was named Truthless, they decided they had to leave him in possession of the Honorblade anyway. I expect we’ll find out that sort of detail in the fifth book, though.
L: That seems like such a weird decision to make. “Hey, we’re exiling you, but also take along this priceless, extremely powerful artifact of which we only have so many, which will practically give you the powers of a god.” Like… what’s their end game goal with that plan? I don’t get it.
Tight Butts and Coconuts
“Now, I may not be an expert on humans,” she said. “For example, I still haven’t figured out why only a handful of your cultures seem to worship me. But I do think I heard somewhere that you have to sleep. Like, every night.”
L: Bless you, Syl.
Weighty Words
An entire order of the Knights Radiant had survived the Recreance and had been watching for the Desolation for two thousand years, constantly replenishing their numbers as others died of old age.
L: I wonder what specifically about the Skybreakers made it so that they didn’t turn their backs on their spren when everyone else did, after the TruthBomb about the Voidbringers was dropped.
AA: Too self-righteous to believe they could ever be wrong?
L: That certainly does line up with what we’ve seen of Nale so far…
AA: All in one go, we get the entire stack of Skybreaker Ideals. As with at least some other Orders, there is an individual element to each one. Rather than quote the whole section, I’ll just list them here, and how they’re known:
1: The Ideal of Radiance—Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
2: The Ideal of Justice—an oath to seek and administer justice (requires a master to take the seeker as squire)—at this step the would-be Skybreaker learns the Lashings, from the Surge of Gravitation
3: The Ideal of Dedication—an oath to dedicate oneself to a greater truth, choosing a code to follow (requires a spren bond)—the point at which one is considered a full Skybreaker, and the Surge of Division is taught
4: The Ideal of Crusade—choosing a personal quest—when completed to the satisfaction of the spren, one is considered a master
5: The Ideal of Law—in which one becomes law and truth
AA: This is… wow. So much to wrap your head around! The first two are straightforward enough, though “justice—by what standard?” is always a question; I guess you have to take your master’s word for it at this point. Interestingly, the choice of a standard is left to the third Ideal, and (as we’ll see later) every Skybreaker decides for himself what standard to follow.
The fourth Ideal gets even more personal, as it involves a specific quest; Szeth has already decided that cleansing Shinovar will be his fourth Ideal. The fifth Ideal… well, they speak of it as something to “achieve” rather than to declare. I really, really wonder how that works, because it strikes me as a massive delusion of grandeur. Szeth obviously wonders, too:
“Nin told me that we are to follow the law—something external, as men are changeable and unreliable. How can we become the law?”
AA: The answer he’s given makes me want to smack someone.
“Law must come from somewhere,” another of the Skybreaker masters said. “This is not an oath you will swear, so don’t fixate upon it. The first three will do for most Skybreakers. I was of the Third Ideal for two decades before achieving the Fourth.”
AA: I mean… arrogant much? The idea that an individual, a mortal, is capable of being justice is… ugh. On the other hand, the patronizing tone of the rest of it is also ugh, and makes me reasonably sure that Szeth will achieve the Fourth in less than two years, rather than two decades. I sort of expect that he’ll achieve the Fifth within the scope of the series, and I’m not sure if I like that idea or not!
L: I wouldn’t be surprised if he achieved the Fourth in the next book, honestly. But back to the concept of becoming the law. I wonder if this means something more esoteric, like that the Skybreaker must study and fully comprehend ethics and become enlightened? But in so doing I imagine that they’d realize that there rarely is a cut and dried answer, thereby rendering all they’ve learned so far null and void. I imagine those who have gained this ideal as almost… Dalai Lama type figures, sitting on mountaintops and giving wise advice to seekers of knowledge. But that’s just my personal head-canon and has no basis in… anything at all.
AA: So of course I had to go searching… There are apparently a couple of prevailing theories out there, and Brandon has said that either could be true for a given Skybreaker and there is actually disagreement within the Order on what it means. One possibility is that when you achieve the Fifth Ideal, everything you do is by definition within the (true) law. The other is that you cannot willingly violate any law without breaking your Oath. Personally, I hope the latter is ultimately the right interpretation, although I’d bet that Nale interprets it as the former.
As always, it comes back to the first question of justice: by what standard?
Cosmere Connections
Vasher says there are magic fish here.
L: Is this our first actual real-name mention of Vasher (from Warbreaker)? I think it is!
AA: Yes, I believe so! At least, a search in Arcanum Unbounded doesn’t give me any hits, and this is the first time we see Szeth and Nightblood in Oathbringer, so… Vasher!! Not that it necessarily draws the connection to Zahel, but still.
I was going to point out that this statement proves that the two of them arrived on Roshar together—except it doesn’t. Vasher was here before, so he could have told Nightblood about the magic fish before they ever left Nalthis. Rats anyway—I was hoping I’d found a clue.
I don’t think you’re evil at all, and I only destroy things that are evil.
L: Perhaps a reminder on what Nightblood is, and his backstory (what we know of it, at least) is in order. On the off chance that any of you haven’t read Warbreaker, and are confused as all heck as to what this talking sword is all about. Alice, you want to lead us in this one, since you did the Warbreaker reread?
AA: Our favorite talking sword!! I love Nightblood. Also, he gives me the shivers.
Nightblood was an attempt (by Vasher and his wife Shashara, two of the Five Scholars on Nalthis) to create a Shardblade like the ones they’d seen on Roshar when they worldhopped here some 300 or so years ago. It didn’t work right, because they were using the wrong magic system; instead of a cognitive entity who could take a physical form, they created a physical object with (some) cognition. In local parlance, they Awakened it, at the cost of a thousand Breaths and an exceedingly difficult visualization. Since every Awakening requires a Command, they told it to “Destroy Evil.” Unfortunately, steel has no inherent moral compass, so “evil” is a concept beyond Nightblood’s comprehension. His primary definition of evil is “anyone who tries to steal me and use me to do bad stuff” (which still doesn’t define “bad”) and secondarily seems to be “anyone who tries to hurt the person wielding me if I like them.” (That’s just my interpretation, by the way.)
The biggest challenge for a knowledgeable and careful person with Nightblood is that when it is removed from its scabbard, even a little bit, it starts guzzling Investiture. On Nalthis, that meant taking all the Breath from anyone it could touch, and then taking the life as well. On Roshar, we’ll see it coming to mean absorbing all the Stormlight in the vicinity and then beginning to devour the person holding it or anyone it touches. It has no concept of “it’s time to stop” unless you can shove it back in its sheath; even then, it refuses to believe that it’s gone too far or could possibly have hurt anyone who wasn’t evil, because… “destroy evil.”
“I have been warned, sword-nimi,” Szeth reminded the weapon, “not to draw you except in the case of extreme emergency. And only if I carry much Stormlight, lest you feed upon my soul.”
AA: And now my burning question is, assuming he was warned by Nale… who told Nale? Did he learn it from Vasher? Was the knowledge passed along by whoever held the sword until it got from Vasher to Nale? Or… did Nale let/observe someone use it and discover the hard way?
L: My spheres are on that last one.
A Scrupulous Study of Spren
“Pattern’s watching over them.” She wrinkled her nose. “Strange.”
“He’s nice, Syl.”
“That’s the strange part.”
AA: Just in case you’d forgotten, Honorspren don’t think very highly of Cryptics. At least in theory. In practice, Syl seems to be discovering that an individual Cryptic can be pretty okay.
“We don’t sleep; we don’t eat. I think we might feed off humans, actually. Your emotions. Or thinking about us, maybe.”
L: This reminds me a great deal of the fae and how belief in the magic makes it real.
AA: Which also reminds me… spren are “real” in a very different way in Shadesmar.
It was so strange to be able to feel her head on his arm. He was accustomed to her having very little substance.
AA: We’ve seen some evidence of this already, what with Pattern seeming to weigh as much as a human and Syl prodding Kaladin to move in the earlier chapters. But here, Kaladin finally registers the solidity of his spren. It seems significant, but I’m not 100% sure why.
Sheer Speculation
L: So, let’s chat about this mind/body connection thing, shall we?
Perhaps it was because of the way he left a glowing afterimage when he moved: a sign of his soul’s improper reattachment.
L: This is really cool. I believe we talked a bit about this in the Edgedancer reread as well, but there’s just so much to dig into here! So many questions! Can he detach his soul and do some astral projection type stuff now? Can he enter Shadesmar, or see into it, maybe? How is this going to come into play in the long run, because you just know Sanderson didn’t put it in without planning on using it somehow.
AA: Oh, good call. I haven’t really thought about it with both hands yet, but you’re right; Sanderson wouldn’t put in a poorly-attached soul leaving an afterimage without intending to do something amazing with it. What could it be?
Let’s see… we know that when a Shardblade cuts through a body part, it “dies” because the soul is cut, right? So… with a semi-detached soul, could his body be unaffected by a Shardblade? Or what happens if someone misses his body, but hits the afterimage with a Blade?
Oh, hey… The second Skybreaker Surge is Division. Seems like there ought to be some connection there, doesn’t it?
Honestly, I don’t know what to expect from it, but I’ll bet there’s something awesome coming, and I’ll bet it has to do with the Cognitive realm somehow.
Quality Quotations
He wouldn’t have thought that soldiers would care that the ground wasn’t level. Shouldn’t he be sharpening his spear, or … or oiling something?
Next week, we’ll be hitting one chapter and returning to the Skybreakers and Szeth! Join us then, and as always, if you have theories or thoughts of your own, feel free to join the discussion in the comments!
Alice is just hanging out in the cool of the Pacific Northwest, where August hasn’t been nearly as warm as it should be. One of those summers—but it keeps the wildfire danger down.
Lyndsey is kind of wishing she had a talking sword of her own, even if it did keep urging her to destroy evil. If you’re an aspiring author, a cosplayer, or just like geeky content, follow her work on Facebook or Instagram.
So something I remember from further in the book one of the boons offered to Dalinar sounded suspiciously like nightblood
@1, it sounded familiar, so I just checked. Sounds an awful lot like that Nightblood indeed … Which adds to the questions regarding the hands who have (possibly) held Nightblood between Vasher’s and Nale’s.
Not really connected to these chapters, and I cannot remember if it has been addressed in the end of the book or anywhere else already, but it just hit me yesterday – if Szeth decides to follow Dalinar around due to his oath, how big are the chances that they happen to chat and Szeth happens to mention that it was Taravangian who assigned him on the killing spree of all the nobles and kings during these last years?
@1 Yup, that’s how I interpreted that, too. So, if Nale got Nightblood from the Nightwatcher, then he could have gotten the info then.
@2 That happened already. Taravangian admitted to using Szeth to kill the other leaders – while clarifying/denying that he hadn’t killed Gavilar (which we know is true, too). So that’s already out of the bag. Taravangian described it to his cohort as giving some of the truth to conceal the greater (namely, his long goals, letting in the Parh army to Urithiru, and plan to ally with Odium).
Re: the post, count me as one who grew far more sympathetic to Szeth this book for many of the reasons Lyndsey mentioned (he does feel guilty and is trying to change) and I also adored his conversations with sword-nimi. I will point out that Nale has sworn the 5th ideal, and I imagine that his interpretation is probably more along the lines of “whatever I do is just”. Also, I don’t think it was the case that Nale went to Ishar, saw he was cray-cray, and went elsewhere for guidance. If I remember right, he says later that Ishar is still the one he trusts as not having gone mad. I could be remembering wrong, though.
Since Szeth has sworn a few Ideals, shouldn’t he have bonded a Spren by now? It’s weird that he doesn’t have one. Does Nightblood somehow count as his Spren?
Judge Dredd swore the 5th ideal…
@5 – LOL! I didn’t betray the law! I AM the law!
Note on the voices in Szeth’s head. I think they are echoes from the Spiritual Realm. I remember a long time ago when I first thought that the Spiritual Realm was the afterlife. It’s not the afterlife for souls; it’s a realm of pure investiture. That investiture has ties to the other realms, which is why I think stuff can echo there. Make sense?
@@.-@ He gets his spren at the end of Oathbringer – when he swears the 3rd ideal. He actually does the whole final battle having made the decision to follow Dalinar but not having het sworn. He swears it at the end when he talks to Nale at the end. As he swears it, he senses his spren and its approval. But, interestingly, “we” haven’t fully seen it or talked to it yet. So, to summarize – he has bonded by the end of the book but we don’t have many details.
Thanks, Whitespine. I thought the Spren bonding should have happened before the 3rd ideal. Kal bonded Syl before he swore the second ideal and almost broke his bond with her before swearing number 3. IDK maybe Skybreakers just work differently… Regardless -Should be exciting seeing Szeth weilding 2 Shardblades. I hope they (Nightblood and the unnamed spren) get along.
RE: Nale taking the 5th
He definitely has some respect for existing legal systems. That is why he didn’t kill Lift in WoR.
RE: Szeth is only mostly dead (so no loose change)
Does that mean he is close to being a cognitive ghost/could a ghost slip into those cracks (hello Kelsier)?
Also, for later discussion probably, how does being exposed to Nightblood affect his connection to himself? Would Nightblood consume the physical but leave the spiritual connection? Would it actually fill the gap and bond itself to Szeth?
WRT the Fifth Ideal of the Skybreakers, in a later chapter Szeth points out Nale’s selective enforcement of the law (he specifically hunted fledgling Radiants while ignoring other criminals), and Nale defends himself by citing his status as a Skybreaker of the Fifth Ideal. So it sounds like the Fifth Ideal has something to do with interpreting or selecting the law.
Two main thoughts.
1. Ugh, I detest the Skybreakers. I think the concept/standard of absolute law is a horrible idea. And honestly, Nale takes the cake for me a bigger monster than Szeth. There is absolutely no way Nale didn’t know that murdering Surgebinders was going to protect the Oathpact. He was just a coward who didn’t want to have look himself in the mirror.
2. Does anyone else think that Vasher went to Cultivation/Nightwatcher and received his own curse/boon? Maybe that’s why the Nightwatcher was “able” to offer it to Dalinar?
I think it was stated in this very chapter that he was being observed by a spren, as that was one of the main reasons for the next test. The spren seem to have their own rules (of course they do) on picking someone to bond with, in comparison to the rest.
Now for the Szeth chapter: I love it. it a short fun exercise, and it shows Szeth finally finding some peace within himself despite his crimes.
@FSS @5 thats how I picture most watchers
I have to wonder what the Skybreakers were like before their Herald went mad. I imagine they would have been more Lawful Good than Lawful Neutral. Still following the law, but with some common sense and compassion mixed in. (I want to suggest that that’s what the Fifth Ideal was meant to be, which is why none of the modern ones can achieve it- but I can’t account for Nale with that theory. Oh well).
I do find it funny that later on that it is unusual for Skybreakers to swear to a individual…when it looks like that most of the Skybreakers swear to Nale and HIS interpretation of the law. it seems that Nale’s insanity is hypocrisy
According to the annotations for Warbreaker:
I think the ideal Kaladin has to reach has to do with finding the moral balance to accept his limits, that there will be times he has to choose what to defend even when that means standing up to those he wishes he could also defend. Right now, he sees that only as failure. Worse, he sees it as denying what he’s sworn to do, to protect others.
He needs to find a place where he can accept that, when it’s the best he can do, it means he’s still doing his best.
I honestly wonder if there is just something wrong with the Radiant Highspren. We readers never get to meet one, and I don’t recall any of the Skybreakers talking abut their spren having a thought or opinion, or anything that treats them like thinking entities. Were they damaged by the same thing that made Honor go mad? It just seems like something is really off.
Ok wow, I loaded this up 4 hours ago and only just found the time to finish reading.
Someone else said it above, but Nale did respect the local laws when they forbade him from going after Lift. He also always seemed to look for an excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway. I lean towards Nale’s version of oath 5 forcing him to live by the law.
Having Pattern just hanging around in his cognitive form has got to be off putting for the Shadesmar crew.
I can only think of Terry Prarcheft’s comment, via Sam Vimes: “Two types of people laugh at the law — those that break it and those that make it.”
I hated all of Szeth’s previous POV chapters, as he slaughtered and tried in vain to stop slaughtering and then got resurrected when I thought we were finally rid of him. This is where they startrd getting enjoyable. Him calling Nightblood “sword-nimi” seems cute, even though I don’t know what “nimi” means. And it’s interesting to see an order of Radiants that has maintained a presence in the world, such that some of its (non-Herald) leaders have “decades” of experience, whereas the other orders are just now resurfacing and fumbling around to figure out exactly what they can do and what they’re supposed to do.
I think some Rosharans wouldn’t share Nightblood’s belief that the Assassin in White isn’t evil at all.
I guess that chapter icon is Szeth hiding his face in sorrow or something, but it looks amusingly like he’s facepalming.
Kaladin saw some gloryspren fly by. Does that mean someone in thw Physical Realm’s equivalent vicinity is being glorious? Some spren movements in the Cognitive Realm respond to conditions there, instead, like the fearspren approaching Kaladin and leaving when he doesn’t have fear to give it. Sorry. I’m still struggling to undersrand how this stuff works.
Sigzil isn’t there, is he? Did I miss something?
Note that while Szeth has lost body/soul connection to some extent, Lift bridges the Physical and Cognitive and is a living Perpendicularity. Obviously, the stuff about LIft is just my speculation.
Szeth and the Skybreakers! (Potentially a good band name) And the introduction of Master Ki! (Ha! “Ki, master”! I just got that; I don’t know if it’s on purpose, but it would be a nice shout out to Ghostbusters and the Matrix!)
Name similarities aside, I like what we see of Ki’s character. And finally; someone who can tell us more about KR ideals and practices!! So, I hope she doesn’t switch to Odium’s side, as Nale and many of the other Skybreakers appeared to be ready to do as of the end of Oathbringer.
I also liked this insight into Kaladin’s past. It’s noteworthy to see that Kaladin has both a drive to protect and a reluctance/fear of killing. I think that makes a quintessential Windrunner.
Lyndsey, I appreciate your defense of Szeth (He was totally gaslit; I hadn’t really thought of that until you put it plainly). He’s not a favorite character of mine by any means; but he’s at least deserving of our understanding, and maybe even our sympathies (although I’m sure that’s not the case for a lot of readers).
This is the chapter I finally started to like Szeth. Not that I hated him when he was Truthless, but he wasn’t my favorite. I love how he questions the status quo of the Skybreakers. He seems to have the same question as Alice: who’s justice? He accepts that his people don’t have it, but really, where should he look for that in his experience. That’s why he takes to Dalinar later of course…
It’s fun to see Syl and Pattern as their real selves in this section. Like people sized instead of tiny. And the differences in the manifestations of the spren from what they really look like in Shadesmar. I haven’t looked at it particularly, but I wonder if that changes the way the humans relate to their spren. Now that they realize they’re completely sentient and like people when not in the physical realm.
*I like the idea of Hessi’s Mythica being written by a reclusive Herald. One of them is a scholar friend of Jasnah already right? She could have totally done it on the sly at some point
You know, I think this is the first time we have actually seen Tukks. Has it ever been confirmed what actually happened to him? and he does give some good advice here, it does make you wonder if he COULD be a worldhopper, sanderson doesn’t usualy bring up physical descriptions unless they are distinct.
Yay, more Szeth! I like his character a lot and pity him a great deal. Lyndsey’s description of his as being gaslit is spot-on and really crystallized why I feel for him so strongly. He was told by his entire culture that he had no moral capacity to make decisions – the Truthless label is basically saying “literally anyone in the world could make better moral decisions than you”. And he absorbed that, and wasn’t able to envision himself as someone with the moral capacity to disobey, even when he hated the things he was commanded to do.
I’m concerned that his quest to “cleanse Shinovar” will end very badly, though. Aside from Szeth’s life, most of what we’ve seen and heard about Shinovar makes it sound, well, rather idyllic in comparison to Alethkar. They’re the only place on Roshar with soil and lush plant life, because they’re farthest from the highstorms; they’re peaceful and hate war; they bargain via self-deprecation. They were wrong about the return of the Desolations, but condemning them for that now won’t change a thing. I have a feeling that Szeth’s book will involve him carrying out his ‘quest’ and finding out – perhaps too late – that it does more harm than good.
I find the ethos of the Skybreakers troubling – they’re basically the epitome of Lawful Neutral – and Szeth’s willingness to question himself (and to find loopholes in the rules, in both of his first tests as a Skybreaker – more on that next week) -is something that I think enables him to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of moral certitude and inflexibility that a more typical Skybreaker would fall into.
(There are a few orders of Radiant that seem to map the D&D alignments pretty clearly. Windrunners are Lawful Good, and Edgedancers are probably Neutral Good with a possibility of Chaotic Good. Lift herself is certainly chaotic, but that’s because she’s a child and children typically are.)
For the Kaladin part of the review – I will just reiterate that I love Kaladin and am confident that his willingness to see good in people on both sides of the fight, his desire to product both his own men and the Listeners, is a strength rather than a weakness and will be very important in future.
Alice & Lyndsey. I do not see the issues Kaladin had back when he had his conversation with Tukks as the exact same as he has in the present. Rather it is Kaladin is dealing with a change of his moral code. Before he went into the army, he was his father’s apprentice. Lirin taught him to always try to save lives. Further, Lirin took the attitude that it was never OK to kill somebody. (As an aside, that is different from knowing that you may not be always able to save your patient. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the patient will die. Just try to save those you can. That is one of the reasons why he wrote off Rillir and concentrated on saving the elder Roshane.) Once Kaladin gets to the military, Kaladin learns that mentally he has no issues with killing somebody. The attitude that he would have no inhibitions of killing somebody if necessary, was counter to how Kaladin had been taught to live.
Thereafter, Kaladin had lived his life with the philosophy that it was Kaladin’s duty to protect those who under his protection or charge. His squad; his fellow escaped slaves; Bridge 4; all of the Bridgemen in the other teams; Dalinar and Dalinar’s family (including Elhokar); the re-awakened Singers who like Kaladin used to be slaves and who he traveled with; the Wall Guard. Yet during the Battle of Kholinar, Kaladin had to confront a situation he never had to before: more than one “group/family” which Kaladin believed he was responsible for protecting were on opposite sides. Kaladin became essentially paralyzed. He could not choose one over the other. This is part of what he now must realize. In the past it was OK to protect a certain group/class. But in the future that group/class may not even need Kaladin’s protection, but they may be on opposite sides of a struggle.
Lyndsey. I think the reason that the Skybreakers did not renounce their Oaths during the Recreance is because at that time Nale was not as far gone/delusional as he is in current times. He may have believed that justice demanded that the Skybreakers not intentionally break their Oaths and thus “murder” their spren.
Alice. When Vasher worldhopped to Roshar and saw the Shardblades, is it possible he encountered Nale. If that was the case, maybe Vasher told Nale about Nightblood when Vasher brought Nightblood to Roshar. Unfortunately, this theory does not account for how Cultivation and the Nightwatcher obtained Nightblood. When Dalinar was talking to Nightwatcher, she offered him Nightblood. I would guess that she or Cultivation had to have Nightblood at that time. I doubt she could have willed Nightblood to leave the possession of whoever held it and appear to Dalinar if he had wanted such a weapon.
Thanks for reading my musings.
AndrewHB
aka the musespren
I reread this week and next week’s Szeth chapters this afternoon, and I noticed that Szeth is really the only Skybreaker to question things or look beyond the surface of things. The other squares just go along with whatever the masters say and follow the most obvious interpretations of their orders. Honestly, if it were a lesser writer I’d think Szeth was just being written as an author’s pet, but since this is Brandon and he’s (usually) better than that, I assume there’s a real reason. I would wonder if there’s something about the culture of the Skybreakers that encourages just going along with whatever your superiors tell you. Like those news articles about Chinese schools teaching kids to just parrot their teachers, and how that stunts their creativity and initiative the when they grow up. Szeth has already gone down that road and hit rock bottom, so he’s always questioning things. Still obedient if the answers make sense, but he questions.
If Szeth’s soul is separated from his body, then his body isn’t immune from a Shardblade: it just means that the Shardblade will cut his body as it will any other nonliving physical object. Remember that we’ve seen this before: the first Shardblade cut on a chasmfiend’s leg kills the leg, then the second cut removes the dead leg from the body.
@24 Steven Hedge
Kaladin’s squad was wiped out on the same day that Tien was killed. I believe Kaladin reported them as all dead when he went to look for Tien. My theory is that because there weren’t any messenger boys available, Kaladin got sent to relay a message and that’s the reason he survived; So I think Kaladin lived only because Tien died. That would mess anybody up.
I do really like Tukks. He seems a good sort. Caring, which is what he encouraged Kaladin to be.
I, too, have my suspicions about Tukks, given that he exhibits some typical traits of a worldhopper. We also now know from the Ghostblood letter to Shallan that there were GB operatives in Amaram’s army and this could have been how they became aware of Tien. OTOH, Tukks doesn’t use any inappropriate expressions and his talk about caring doesn’t fit. So, who knows, he might be a red herring. If he is a worldhopper, he likely faked his death.
How did the Skybreakers hide their massive fortress in Purelake? IIRC, from the fisher interlude in… WoK(?) not even the natives know that it exists, though it did appear in one of Dalinar’s visions. A net of Illusion fabrials?
I hated Szeth’s contrived survival/return to life in WoR with the hatred of the thousand suns and while he did grow on me through his interaction with Lift and Nightblood in Edgedancer and OB, I still very much hope that he dies for good in book 5 at the latest. I particularly dislike the retcon of his main motivation for going through with the murders – in WoK and most of WoR it wasn’t honor at all, but the fear of being denied an afterlife if he didn’t follow the percepts of being Truthless. Which, I am sure the Heralds could have told him a thing or 2 about how oblivion is very much preferrable to eternal torment. I was unpleasantly surprised when WoBs confirmed that Nale wasn’t simply deluded where Szeth’s reasons were concerned. Oh, well. I still can’t help but wonder who our “present” Skybreaker PoV would have been if Sanderson had continued with his original intention of killing Szeth at the end of WoR and whether they would have ended up with Nightblood.
Concerning the Skybreakers – I don’t think that they could have finagled a pardon for Szeth in Azir or Ja-Keved, after all his regicides – no kind of “letter-of-law” contortions could excuse _that_, so his pardon is indeed only from the local authorities. But them being so well connected makes me wonder how the news of their defection to Odium – and that of the Herald of Justice, no less! isn’t going to deliver the finishing blow to the anti-Odium alliance. Unfortunately, I suspect that this whole issue is going to be relegated to book 5 in a clearly artificial manner, just like it seemingly occured to nobody among the scholars – not even Jasnah(!) to question Rlain about his people’s lore or even about their reasons for murdering Gavilar(!!!) in OB. Or how Jasnah’s own interactions with highspren in Shadesmar apparently didn’t produce anything of note…
And speaking of the Skybreaker connections, they must have had a routine for removing nascent surgebinders without criminal pasts, while technically keeping their own hands clean. We have seen examples of such with Shallan and Tien, but I also wonder about Teft’s sect of Envisagers – was the Brightlord’s savage reaction encouraged by somebody? Could he have been Skybreaker-adjacent himself? And the many assassination attempts on Jasnah – she must have been a thorn in Nale’s side, absolutely untouchable by the law, but by his lights he couldn’t just let her evolve into a high-level Radiant, could he? And, of course, I believe that the spren who led the Parshendi to Szeth with such suspiciously convenient timing was Nale’s highspren. And that Nale was the one who ensured that Szeth was available for them to buy as well.
Regarding the Skybreakers not disbanding, I suspect that Ishar and Nale were instrumental in pushing the old Radiants to the Recreance, and that retaining the Skybreakers to prevent the other Orders from returning was part of their plan, since the 2 of them couldn’t have policed the whole of Roshar alone. The rule-following nature of the highspren made them the logical choice for the one Order that could be trusted not to overstep the limits. And also, Nale’s leadership likely ensured that none of the other Skybreakers reached the Fifth Ideal and “the greater power of the Oaths”, whatever it might be.
Toothlessjoe @8:
From what we have seen in Dalinar’s vision with the Midnight Essence, all the Orders used to recruit in a similar manner – directing likely people towards travelling to Urithiru and becoming squires, though I imagine that the other spren likely still occasionally bonded a very compatible person out in the world. Kaladin et al. aren’t good examples for how things used to be back in the days of the old Radiants though, when they were organized and spren available for bonding mostly taken by the already existing knights. I am very much looking towards Szeth’s prissy highspren and Nightblood being an “angel” and a “devil” on his shoulders, with their roles switching depending on the issue.
Keyblazing @11:
Judging by Nale’s reaction when he could no longer deny that the Desolation has arrived in Edgedancer, he sincerely believed that he was helping to prevent it by killing the surge-binders. How and why he could think so is an open question, for now. Sure, he is mad, but there is a method to his madness, which I expect to be revealed eventually.
Dalinar would have been so toast, if he had agreed to take Nightblood!
Nightheron @18:
A Skybreaker master will say something about consulting with their spren in a future chapter, so their opinions do matter. I was generally put off by the Radiant spren keeping hidden and not interacting with people other than their bondmates in the physical realm in OB, or even with each other. It was obiously done to preserve Renarin’s secret and make Ehlokar’s almost-bonding a surprise, but it felt very artificial to me. And even more so in these chapters, with assembled members of the same Order, where their spren really had no reason to be shy.
AeronaGreyjoy @20:
Thankfully, the Skybreakers don’t have a lot of experience using their surges, because of the secrecy, so combat-wise they aren’t as far ahead of the others as they might have been.
I like to think that the glory spren have something to do with Our Heroes squires successfully escaping Kholinar with little Gav.
KiManiak @22:
I also like Master Ki and hope that she doesn’t switch to Odium. In fact, I very much hope that Nale overestimated how many of the Skybreakers are ready to do that. Though, those who swore to follow him as their Third Ideal probably have no choice but to dissolve their bonds if they refuse. Unless they can somehow rationalize that they swore to follow what Nale _used_ to represent, but doesn’t anymore?
Szeth may have been gaslit, but I hope that he eventually realises that even if he had been truly Truthless, both the guilt and large part of the blame are his, because he could have chosen to stop at any point. He knew it was wrong and he continued anyway.
Joyspren @23:
IIRC none of Jasnah’s friends made me think that they might have been a secret Herald. One of them was a male pastry chef from Thaylenah writing under a female pseudonym, therefore “reclusive” by neccessity. I really hope that he joins Jasnah in the next book, because she needs all the trustworthy help with research that she can get and it is time for convention-defying folks from Vorin nations to come out.
Liss/The Weeper the assassin who was almost contracted with the murder of Aesudan, though, is another matter. I strongly suspect her of being a Herald, and so do some other readers. But she wasn’t exactly Jasnah’s friend.
@26 musespren
Your opening paragraph helped me realize something. Here we actually get a really clear description of Kaladin’s problem. He has no problem killing – he has a problem with failing to protect. That’s it. He couldn’t handle when people died on his operating table, he couldn’t stand losing his squad/prisoners/bridge 4. He’s fine to kill the “other”, though, especially if it helps him protect. We even see this in WoK flashbacks when he says he wishes Lirin had killed Roshone on the table. His conundrum now really is like the gemstone from the other 3rd oath Windrunner: “Isn’t he supposed to want to protect everyone?” His ‘other’ group is shrinking and the ‘chicks under his wings’ are multiplying, so now killing isn’t as easy. Note, I’m not making judgements on the idea of killing to protect, I’m just describing Kaladin’s perception. Maybe this wasn’t news to any of you – I don’t know if it was really news to me – but for some reason something just crystalized for me with all that. His character really has been consistent the whole time. It still is. It is only window of who is protected and who is expendable that is shifting.
@11 I like the idea Vasher going to Cultivation and trading in Nightblood for a boon. He has issues all the way back from when he killed his wife plus whatever has Vivienna hunting him as a criminal.
It’s more apparent as we learn more about the orders that the knights/orders weren’t all in agreement and that not all knights had the same ideas of what is noble.
@KiManiak :
Did you ever notice that Japanese ki, and Chinese chi (same word) translate as “breath”[1]? So Awakeners on Nalthis are technically Chi Masters, and of course Radiants breathe Stormlight to use their abilities.
I hope Tukks isn’t a Worldhopper. Some characters have to not be Easter eggs, Brandon! It can’t all be a Where’s Waldo book.
@Isilel:
It’s hard for spren to interact in the Physical Realm, or with the Physical. In the current chapter of the reread, Syl seems to imply that she literally never spoke to a Cryptic before now, and she was a Radiant pre-Recreance. Odd, since we see thriving markets and whatnot in Shadesmar.
[1]Footnote: some translate “chi” as “spirit”. Of course, if you think about it “spirit” is also “breath”. Same root as respiration.
I always felt like Szeth’s voices were somehow related to Dalinar’s.
I think there is room for some interesting things to pursue as it relates to the Skybreakers (man, I keep wanting to say Skywalkers, lol. That wouldn’t be a bad name for the Windrunners, you know? Might be some copyright issues though… ) especially as it relates to Law and mercy – kind of a Javert/Jean Valjean kind of dichotomy.
Even though Skybreakers are the order where natural lawyers would seem to make their home, I don’t see them as very Byzantine in their operations. They seem much more straitforward in their dealings. So them having their hand in the Recreance, the plot to assassinate Jasnah, and operations suchlike seem a stretch to me. That they have something going on in the background, either Nale himself or every Skybreaker is undeniable based on the evidence, but I personally can’t see them using methods that so closely resemble Ghostbloods.
Kaladin’s squad wasn’t wiped out on the same day Tien died. They’d finished their operations and then Kaladin deserted to look for his brother on the battlefield. At least that’s what I remember. Gotta do another re-read, I’m due for another WOK week.
@45 EvilMonkey
TWoK, chapter 67, has Kaladin’s flashback to the day Tien was killed. It starts with Kaladin fleeing a hilltop overwhelmed by enemy forces, and reporting that his squad was all dead. He goes looking for Tien, gets wounded, kills his first man, and then sees Tien get killed. It seems like it was an eventful day.
Isilel@30 – I would guess that it depends on what specific oath each Skybreaker swore to follow Nale. This is definitely an Order that focuses on the specificity of wording and loopholes.
Also, I still think that Jezrien’s “death” and its impact on Nale (if it was anything similar to what happened to Ash and Taln) may affect the Skybreakers pledging of their loyalty to Odium’s side.
Carl@33 – So I wonder how folks are pronouncing “Ki”? With the hard “i”? Or with the hard “e”? Or some other way? I pronounce it like “key”, just like my name. (Hence “Ki-master”, as a playful reference to Ghostbusters or the Matrix, or I guess any locksmith for that matte.)
Anyway, I did not know the Japanese “ki” and Chinese “chi” were essentially the same word, but I did know that “chi” could refer to “spirit” or “inner energy” or the like.
Chinese qì (or ch’i in Wade-Giles transcription that is common in English) is the same character as Japanese ki: 氣 (traditional character) / 気 (Japanese simplified version) / 气 (Chinese simplified version).
Spirit/god (spren in Roshar) would be 神 (Chinese shén, Japanese kami or Sino-Japanese shin).
To expand on what @birgit ways, Japanese ki (“kee”) is literally the Chinese word chi (“chee”) adopted and adapted into their language from their neighbors. It’s a close match to English spirit being adapted from Latin spiritus. Of course the real world is complicated, with all those languages having dialects, variants, etc. (I’m also surely transcribing the pronunciation wrong, since East Asian languages don’t really use the same phonemes as Germanic ones.)
Another match is Spanish and other Romance languages’ alma and its cognates, which come from Latin animus, which is also “breath” (originally something like “breeze”).
Hmm … online research indicates that Hebrew nephesh is also from a word meaning “breath”. Interesting. Hah, and ruach (“spirit”) is likewise from a word meaning “wind”. I never knew that. Now that I think about it, though, former missionary Brandon quite probably did.
Germanic languages like English have the word soul, seele, saiwala, which is not so easily traceable because the origin happened long before Germanic-speakers were literate, but seems to go back to the same root as sea, and implies that proto-Germanic speakers thought that people’s essence came from the water.
The more I think about it, the more I like the juxtaposition of these two chapters together on the reread.
If I understand Kaladin’s problem correctly, he froze because he is capable of killing, but cares whether or not the person on the other end of his spear deserves death. Tukks was able to council his into accepting an “us vs. them” mindset to deal with this. Kaladin lost this at Kholinar, and so froze again. He is a “career killer’ (his words to describe Tukks) who doesn’t want to kill those who don’t deserve death.
Szeth is also a killer. He killed not because he thought those people deserved death, but because he thought he deserved to kill them as a punishment for himself. It’s a rather twisted concept of justice, if you ask me. The thought of killing people or making them suffer for a crime they didn’t commit never makes Szeth freeze. I don”t have much confidence in the Skybreakers if they see murdering hundreds of people as punishment for the murderer as a viable system, let alone condone it as legally acceptable. I have to question the sanity on the lot of them for that judgment call.
Nightblood can hear the screaming voices in Szeth’s head. Not sure what that means exactly. Whatever the connection to the spiritual realm that causes Szeth to hear the voices, they’re enough in his head that Nightblood can hear them with whatever telepathy or whatever the sword has.
Szeth’s little grumble about not being able to “claim” death just like he couldn’t claim most other things amused me. I guess Kaladin really got under his skin when he dropped out of the sky with a superhero landing and overdramatically claimed the skies as his own. Heh.
@40
Everything is open to interpretation but while I see a juxtoposition in this situation, it isn’t the one you mention.
For Kaladin it’s not so much that he worries whether or not the person he kills with the spear deserves it, it’s more that he was trained and indoctrinated to view all life as precious and worth preservation. It’s about him being able to kill at all that’s his issue. His proficiency terrifies him. Tukks gave him a coping mechanism to deal with the conflict between his talent and his training. It served him well until it didn’t.
For Szeth, he wasn’t thinking about who deserves what at all during his time as Truthless. He only knew that he was unworthy to make any decisions at all. He gave his right to make decisions to whomever held the oathstone, surrendered his agency despite whatever he may have felt about anything.
I think the problem for both of them is that they are geniuses in a field that they’d rather not be good. It has kept them alive against sometimes impossible odds but that talent has also brought them torment.
The juxtoposition I see is Kaladin breaks because he tries to take responsibility for everything while Szeth Skybreaker is on a path to healing because he has started to reclaim his responsibility by taking back his agency.
Carl @33:
It wasn’t presented as hard for either Syl or Pattern to talk with other humans while in the physical realm in WoR, which they have done quite a bit of, only to pull back completely in OB. Syl was quite gregarious with the other bridgemen and Pattern, once he inadverently revealed himself to the scholars helping Shallan, was rather sassy to them. And, of course, the seats in the gathering hall in Urithiru are constructed with the pedestals for the spren to “occupy”, which implies that they were supposed to be visible during and to participate in the public discussions.
EvilMonkey @35:
The whole clandestine Order continuing to exist for 2 millenia after the Recreance, exterminating the other budding Radiants, is already Byzantine enough, IMHO. And to do the latter, givet their limitation of having to stay within the letter of the law, they are pretty much required to engage in intrigues and plots. Otherwise the other Orders would have come back long since, through the people without criminal past, like young Shallan and Tien or people whom no law would condemn, like Jasnah and Gavilar. Nale and his Skybreakers couldn’t despatch any of them directly, yet it is now clear that they found a way to eliminate Tien and took a good crack at Shallan. Why not the other 2?
It is kind of illuminating that they never tried to stop Szeth, who was committing a series of terrible crimes, breaking all the laws of the respective countries. Yes, hunting the surge-binders seems to have been the Skybreaker main goal, but didn’t they also help the law enforcement in the Azish sphere of influence on occasion? You’d also think that Szeth demonstrating surge-binding so publicly would help to excite interest in it again, which they’d want to avoid?
KiManiak @37:
I really wonder how Sanderson can handle the 3 Heralds who came out of the woodwork so far in a plausible manner. Taln’s insanity, at least, provides a good excuse for him not saying or doing anything of significance. But, how can he justify Shalash keeping back the knowledge about the past until her flashback book somewhere in the second pentology? Or make Nale’s public defection to the enemy less than utterly devastating to the peoples who have been indoctrinated for thousands of years to see the Heralds as the personifications of everything that is right and true? And have it happen during the 1-year-gap, no less.
I guess the Heralds can become comatose for a year as a result of whatever was done to Jezrien, but that would mean a good number of them dying of-screen, which would be terribly anti-climactic.
@42, Isilel
Good question! I would imagine you could just stretch out finding all of the other Heralds over the course of RoW. They could have just refuse to act and the Radiants have to convince them to help. I think that’s plausible enough if all they want is to run from the Oathpact. Book 5 would then be the conclusion of the war. The flashbacks from the Heralds could probably contain like 2 of the second pentology, with the other three being whatever the big conflict is.
As for humans, I don’t think they would be all that devastated. It’s not like they have to fight Nale and his Skybreakers head-on. It would be the Radiants, and they wouldn’t be intimidated.
@Isilel, #42: Shallan as non-criminal? She murdered her father! OK, the very young Shallan was probably not a criminal. I have no idea about Veden laws on homicide in self-defense.